モラエスの庭 : (2)「随想」の変質

This paper is an essay on Moraes’s Tokushima no Bon-odori, part of the outcomes of the Project Studies by the activities in 2011 of Moraes’s Studies Group launched in July 31, 2010. The members of Moraes’s Studies Group, T. Miyazaki (English Literature), M. Satoh (Plant Physiology), M. Sakai (Clinical Psychology), all at the Institute of Socio-Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokushima, have been continuing to try to analyze Moraes’s works and to approach a new facet of Moraes’s biographical aspects. Moraes was fascinated by the far-east Japan, and fell in love with Oyoné, who died soon after the marriage. After her death Moraes decided to live in Tokushima, which was Oyoné’s hometown. He lived with Koharu, Oyoné’s niece, for a while until she died from tuberculosis at the age of 23. His life until his death in Tokushima was a kind of hermit, disregard of his fame as Consul General and Navy high-rank Officer of Portugal, and other financial merits entailed with them.
Moraes published Tokushima no Bon-odori in 1913 after Oyoné died. This work might be regarded as based on the forms of diary and essay, seemingly as reports from Tokushima to Bento Carqueja, editor of Porto Commercial Newspaper in Portugal. His interest in Kino Tsurayuki’s Tosa-Nikki (Tosa Diary), which was written in the persona of a woman, seems to be the key to understand the modification in the quality of Tokushima no Bon-odori. Though this work was written as a diary and an essay in the persona of alien people to Tokushima, the tone of this work was quite changed at the final part of his letters to Bento Carqueja, the editor. This tentative paper intends to open a new perspective in a rather fixed image of Moraes and studies about him.